Hack Education

I met CodeNow founder Ryan Seashore at a Startup Weekend EDU event in DC late last year, and I was immediately sold on his pitch to help teach kids learn programming. CodeNow focuses specifically on teaching these skills to under-served populations; the non-profit offers its weekend trainings in DC, but...

Politics Following a New York State Court of Appeals ruling, the city of New York has released data about individual teachers' performance, based on the "value-added measurement." Arguing that "shame is not the solution," even Bill Gates thinks the public release of the Teacher Data Reports is a bad idea....

An Explainer Following a lengthy legal battle culminating in a New York State Court of Appeals ruling last week, the city of New York has released data about almost 18,000 individual math and English teachers' performance. The Teacher Data Reports rank teachers based on their students' gains on the state's...

At its education event last month, Apple made the point of touting the amount of educational content it offers via its App Store: some 20,000 apps fall under the "education" category. But we really shouldn't confuse quantity and quality when it comes to educational content. Indeed, in some ways, the...

Ben Greenberg and Rui Xia, the co-founders of Textyard, are moving on to other projects, but in doing so they've open sourced the code that powers the Textyard website, asserting that "any college student with rudimentary coding skills will now be able to take on their local bookstore." Textyard is...

While we were recording our podcast this weekend and discussing the various stories I'd written throughout the week, Steve Hargadon counted up the number of posts I'd penned in my Mozilla research series and asked a really important question: Why should my readers care? To recap: my research is part...

Every week, Steve Hargadon and I sit down (virtually) to talk about the latest ed-tech news. I always find our conversation to be one of the most thought-provoking exchanges I have all week. You can listen to the latest episode (in which we discuss our thoughts on the Horizon Report, iPads in...

Law and Politics President Obama offered his proposed 2013 budget to Congress this week, including $69.8 billion in discretionary funding for education, up 2.5% from 2012. The budget includes $1 billion for a "Race to the Top" for higher ed. The FTC released a report entitled Mobile Apps for Kids:...

Earlier this month, Educause and the New Media Consortium released the 2012 Horizon Report for Higher Ed. Here's my first stab at thinking about the report -- metaphorically, I admit, not technologically -- over on Inside Higher Ed. Photo credits: Me, Manhattan Beach.

This interview is part of my ongoing research/writing project for Mozilla. That research involves my asking the question "Do we need Scratch for HTML5?" to a bunch of folks who are thinking about teaching, learning, writing, coding, building, computing, creating and other associated verbs. So when Vanessa Gennarelli left a...